All of Us at the Door

There are very few pieces of literature that can make a person want to recoil. There are very few pieces of literature that can elicit a hate for the narrator, even fewer that can make you want to keep reading, and almost none that manage to combine all of these together. Joe Mackall's short story "The Little Girl at the Door" is one of these pieces of writing.

Reading this, once you realize that the "intruder. A threat to my family. A domestic terrorist," is, in fact, an eight year old girl, your entire mind frame has no choice but to radically reverse. No longer is the narrator a victim; he is suddenly unreliable, questionable, demanding further reading. The reader simply must keep reading, because his inward moral curiosity demands it. By the end of the story, the narrator has become not unreliable, but the reader is no longer able to sympathize with him. Or so it seems.

But the brilliance in this piece is inherit in its- for lack of a better word- ballsiness. He takes this little girl, his neighbor, and turns her into a type of villain in a way that is completely unsupported. At first reader agrees with him, nodding along as Mackall provides reasoning for this depiction of an eight year old, because no one wants to dislike the narrator. The narrator is supposed to be the hero. But the harsh truth hits the reader at the end: the author is not good, but the reason why the reader hates him is because he's honest about the dark judgment everyone harbors and is guilty of.

Throughout his piece, Mackall is nothing but honest. The misleading bit of rhetoric in his introduction is the only part of his narrative wherein he is less than honest with the reader; in fact, he is so brutally honest that it is almost difficult to read. It's his honestly that is the most disturbing about this piece, because there is no escaping the reality that every one has thought ungrounded, horrible things about someone, especially the reader, because he has just gotten done doing the same thing to Mackall.

This hair raising, bold strategy is something I think I may be a little too shy to employ in my own writing. Mackall hits the reader head on with his "plot twist" and emotion; I save mine until the end. The telling voice in Mackall's piece is an inverse of mine, for I tend to allow the reader to infer rather than inform. However, this story is so compelling that I am slightly eager to try this style myself and see what reactions I can get from people who I see everyday.

Mackall, Joe. "The Little Girl at the Door." Brevity A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction.

Brevity Magazine, 3 Sept. 2015. Web. 26 Sept. 2016.